ps do not always share the concerns of the industrial workers" (p. 248). He then goes on to a distracting discussion of who makes up the classes in conflict theory and only briefly hints at the range of possible ways in which stratification by class works as when, for example, the dominant class promotes hostility, division and mistrust among factions in the lower strata.
The point is not who makes up the class that is being exploited. Nor is the point whether that class will rise up in revolution. The point is that the exploitation takes place and, as change occurred at an incredible rate since Marx's time, the exploitation became increasingly sophisticated but no less complete. The conflict, in Lind's view, "in a managerial capitalist society like our own . . . is not between the "bourgeoisie" (the factory owners) and the "proletariat" (the factory workers) but between the credentialed minority (making a living from fees or wages supplemented by stock options)" and the vast majority of wage-earners (1995, p. 36). This new overclass, including dependents, amounts to the very wealthy five percent of the population and another fifteen percent that makes up the managerial/professional group.
Just as it is not possible to say that either the numerical decline in factory workers in American society or the Soviet Union's history of totalitarianism disproves the conflict analysis of capitalist societies, it is not possible to say that the absence of outright hostility or violent revolution disproves the existence of class warfare. As Lind persuasively demonstrates the great majority of Americans do not at all want to be aware of the extent to which they are being exploited. They choose, instead, to cling to the American Dream that individual merit is sufficient to ensure upward mobility and the belief that they live in a "'pluralist' democracy in which Madisonian 'factions' balance one another, ensuring that no single minority ...